Attention is directed to the liquid detergent compositions disclosed in Australian Pat. Application 82/88168, filed Sept. 9, 1982, by The Procter & Gamble Company; U.K. Pat. Application GB 2,166,153A, filed Oct. 24, 1985, by The Procter & Gamble Company; and U.K. Pat. Application GB 2,160,887A, filed June 19, 1985, by Bristol-Myers Company, all of said published applications being incorporated herein by reference. These liquid detergent compositions comprise certain organic solvents, surfactant, and optional builder and/or abrasive. The prior art, however, fails to teach, or recognize, the advantage of the specific organic solvent herein in a liquid cleaner formulation.
General purpose household cleaning compositions for hard surfaces such as metal, glass, ceramic, plastic and linoleum surfaces, are commercially available in both powdered and liquid form. Powdered cleaning compositions consist mainly of builder or buffering salts such as phosphates, carbonates, silicates, etc. Such compositions display good inorganic soil removal, but they can be deficient in cleaning ability on organic soils such as the calcium and/or magnesium salts of fatty acids, commonly called soap scum or bathtub soil, and greasy/fatty/oily soils typically found in the domestic environment
Liquid cleaning compositions have the great advantage that they can be applied to hard surfaces in neat or concentrated form so that a relatively high level of surfactant material and organic solvent is delivered directly to the soil. Moreover, it is a rather more straightforward task to incorporate high concentrations of anionic or nonionic surfactant in a liquid rather than a granular composition. For both these reasons, therefore, liquid cleaning compositions have the potential to provide superior soap scum, grease, and oily soil removal over powdered cleaning compositions.
Nevertheless, liquid cleaning compositions still suffer a number of drawbacks which can limit their consumer acceptability. Thus, they frequently contain little or no detergency builder salts and consequently they tend to have poor cleaning performance on particulate soil and also lack "robustness" at high water hardness levels. In addition, they can suffer problems of product form, in particular, inhomogeneity, lack of clarity, or inadequate viscosity characteristics, or excessive "solvent" odor for consumer use. The odor problems are made more acute by the higher in-product and in-use surfactant concentrations necessary for improved grease handling, and the consumers' typical habit of diluting the cleaning compositions with hot, or very warm, water which increases the vapor pressure of volatile components.
It has now been determined that a particular butoxy propanol solvent is preferred for odor reasons in liquid cleaners.